Return to an Oral Tradition of Public Performance
Knowledge and performance are inextricably intertwined. All knowledge is communicated through performance of some means, whether staged, organic, live or textual. Necessarily then, the concept of public performance is similarly intermeshed with communal knowledge. Our collective heritage began with verbal, communal performances of knowledge and it appears that we are returning toward a similar disposition: communal performances of knowledge. What is yet to be seen is to what degree it will be verbal. With advances in telepresence technology, it is becoming an ever more imminent possibility.
The concept of an oral tradition is steeped in the interweaving of an individual’s knowledge and the community’s knowledge. The communal knowledge does not continue to exist if it is not performed and many such performances were by an individual. The communal knowledge persevered through the individual’s memory. Before written language, (more…)